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The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children

  • Yanjiao Zhu ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 27, 2024
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

This exploratory study conducted an acoustic analysis of conversational speech produced by three-year-old children who are bilingual in Cantonese and English, as well as of children who are monolingual in one of those languages. Three fundamental frequency features of speech (mean F0, pitch sigma, and F0 range) were measured and compared between the bilingual and monolingual children, as well as within the bilingual children’s two languages. The results demonstrate significant individual variations. Some of the bilingual children exhibited differential F0 features in both languages, while others did not. Language dominance also emerges. In their dominant language Cantonese, the bilingual children produced the F0 patterns the same way as monolingual Cantonese children, whereas in their nondominant language English, the F0 features were different from those of monolingual English children. The findings suggest that three-year-old bilingual children have started developing distinct prosodic patterns for their two languages. However, achieving full command of prosody in both languages remains a prolonged process.

Keywords: child language acquisition; bilingualism; speech; Cantonese; English
Corresponding author: Yanjiao Zhu, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China, E-mail:

Appendix: Example utterances of a bilingual child

Cantonese utterances (and tones)

  1. 不如我哋玩嗰啲嘢。(T1 T4 T5 T2 T2 T1 T5)

  2. 呢個呢都靚架。(T1 T3 T1 T1 T3 T3)

  3. 我想要搽你個手指甲。(T5 T2 T3 T4 T5 T3 T2 T2 T3)

  4. 你呢個手呢右手呢。(T5 T1 T3 T2 T1 T6 T2 T1)

  5. 搽呢隻好大嘅。(T4 T1 T3 T2 T6 T3)

  6. 冇色即係冇囉。(T5 T1 T1 T6 T5 T1)

  7. 有個學校功課囉。(T5 T3 T6 T6 T1 T3 T1)

  8. 俾我啦俾我喇。(T2 T5 T1 T2 T5 T3)

  9. 因為你唔俾我去你屋企呀嘛。(T1 T6 T5 T4 T2 T5 T3 T5 T1 T2 T3 T3)

  10. 飲完水我俾你飲搽啦。(T2 T4 T2 T5 T2 T5 T2 T4 T1)

  11. 唔俾我著呢啲出街架。(T4 T2 T5 T3 T1 T1 T1 T1 T3)

  12. 同我個朋友影相囉。(T2 T4 T3 T4 T5 T2 T2 T1)

  13. 唔知你乖唔乖先啦。(T4 T1 T5 T1 T4 T1 T1 T1)

  14. 而家你要唔要嗰個呀? (T4 T1 T5 T3 T4 T3 T2 T3 T3)

  15. 我嗰個細過你架喎。(T5 T2 T3 T3 T3 T5 T3 T3)

  16. 我嗰個閃過你呀。(T5 T2 T3 T2 T3 T5 T3)

  17. 我攤入去先架喎。(T5 T1 T6 T3 T1 T3 T3)

  18. 你嗰個都抹咗嗱? (T5 T2 T3 T1 T3 T2 T4)

  19. 你要聽話先我俾你。(T5 T3 T1 T2 T1 T5 T2 T5)

  20. 呢一個大過呢一個呀。(T1 T1 T3 T6 T3 T1 T1 T3 T3)

English utterances

  1. Let draw other one.

  2. And then fall down.

  3. You open and then you press this one and then.

  4. And then this one is orange.

  5. I want write that one.

  6. Like that one necklace.

  7. Lulu and my house.

  8. I want eat this one, okay.

  9. Hiding in the where?

  10. I want see ballet.

  11. And this one’s orange rainbow.

  12. I want open the light.

  13. I want the bell name.

  14. I want off the light and then I can see.

  15. You got this one water.

  16. Where’s uncle Stephen teddy bear.

  17. So many time this one.

  18. I want to sit down.

  19. Where is the play dough?

  20. Daddy, can I help you this?

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Received: 2023-08-15
Accepted: 2024-07-16
Published Online: 2024-09-27

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0105
Keywords for this article
child language acquisition; bilingualism; speech; Cantonese; English

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2024
  4. Phonetics & Phonology
  5. The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
  6. Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
  7. Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
  8. Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
  9. Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
  10. The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
  11. Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
  12. Morphology & Syntax
  13. #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
  14. The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
  15. A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
  16. L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
  17. Semantics & Pragmatics
  18. “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
  19. Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
  20. Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
  21. Language Documentation & Typology
  22. Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
  23. The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
  24. Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
  25. Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
  26. Historical & Comparative Linguistics
  27. Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
  28. Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
  29. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  30. Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
  31. Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
  32. Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
  33. Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
  34. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  35. How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
  36. Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
  37. Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
  38. On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
  39. The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
  40. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  41. A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
  42. Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
  43. “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
  44. Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
  45. Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
  46. Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
  47. What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
  48. From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
  49. Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
  50. Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
  51. Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
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  55. Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
  56. Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
  57. Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
  58. Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
  59. The Red Hen Audio Tagger
  60. Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
  61. Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
  62. Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
  63. Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
  64. Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
  65. Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
  66. The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
  67. Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
  68. Cognitive Linguistics
  69. Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
  70. Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
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